Room for praise

Jamie Byng, the publisher at Scotland's Canongate, was shocked by the omission of another Australian from the longlist, as he wrote on the Man Booker website. After praising the chosen novels by Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Barry, Steve Toltz and "bits of" Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, he says: "But I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44 [by Tom Rob Smith], a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller ... over novels as exceptional as Helen Garner's The Spare Room or Ross Raisin's God's Own Country."

After declaring his bias as Garner's British publisher, Byng adds, "this novel has been as well-reviewed as any book Canongate has ever published ... I received remarkable and heartfelt responses from a whole array of other novelists about the book pre-publication including Peter Carey ('The Spare Room is a perfect novel'), Hilary Mantel, John Banville, Alberto Manguel, Diana Athill and Michel Faber, any one of whom I would respect as a judge of serious fiction more than all five of these judges put together ... I am certain that The Spare Room is a modern classic that will continue to be read and enjoyed and appreciated long after all of us are dead."